A site where a man with far too much interest in beer gets to write about it.

Monday, 5 July 2010

Damned if you do and damned if you don't

The anti-alcohol lobby opened a new front this morning: 'think of the children'. On the radio they had some raving alkie talking about how bad she was at one point (up to four bottles of scotch a day) intercut with tiny Tim or whatever her offspring was called saying how bad he thought it was.

This was then followed by Wetherspoons boss Tim Martin and some anti-alcohol bloke discussing how booze is too cheap in supermarkets.

The BBC website also had an article about some children feeling scared when they see adults drinking too much: 'Childwise research director Rosemary Duff said the 30% who felt scared when adults drank was a "sizeable minority".

But she said it was also a concern that nearly half of children were "not bothered" by drunkenness, which, she said, suggested drinking culture had become "ingrained".'

So there you have it, drinking alcohol is bad because it scares children. Unless it doesn't scare them, in which case it's also bad.

I wish these sanctimonious killjoys would just bog off and leave us to get pissed in peace.

The survey results (at least as reported on the Newsround site - which has so gone downhill since John Craven moved to Countryfile) make it clear that half of children were "not bothered" by seeing adults drinking while grown-up BBC has Childwise research director Rosemary Duff seemingly substituting "drunkeness". Which I don't think is the same thing.

@Stringersbeer & IMO also there's a difference between being tipsy, a bit drunk and completely inebriated & indeed different again in being a completely dysfunctional alcoholic.

If a child sees a parent (or both) occasionally drunk, I don't see it as being a major problem, if they're incapable of being a decent parent due to their alcoholism (as the parent in the R4 piece admitted she was) that's a different matter.